Minerals for Complete Nutrition

By Malcolm Green from Dr Squiggles

Mineral deficiencies in animals are surprisingly common. However many go completely unnoticed, as the symptoms are often not life threatening and they make take many years to show. The most common mineral deficiency is calcium. This is such a critical problem it requires an article to itself and I will cover it separately.
However a number of minerals can be deficient in typical small animal diets and there are two main causes:

1. Most animal feeds are made of raw ingredients that have been dried (ripened) prior to harvest. This is true of cereal grains and hay alike. During the ripening process many of the minerals in the plant are returned to the soil in the retreating sap. For the plants this is fine as newly germinating seeds simply recover them through their roots.

2. The bio-availability of the minerals also drops during ripening. In the green sappy plant most minerals are bound in to active molecules. Well-known examples are the iron in haemoglobin and magnesium in chlorophyll. As the gut is very good at absorbing organic molecules like amino acids and sugars fresh foods provide better mineral absorption than dry foods. So grass and silage, fresh vegetables etc. are more nutritious than hay and dried foods.

Most supplements and pellet diets incorporate minerals in the inorganic form like magnesium sulphate or salt. These tend to "clump" together in the gut and be difficult to absorb. However it is now possible to make supplements with organic minerals. These are known as chelates (pronounced ke-lates). The most common technique used is to chelate the mineral with the amino acid methionine. Unfortunately this can be rather unpleasantly smelly. Dr Squiggles uses a technique called Rapisorb. In fact we were only the second company in the world to use this system in animals (the first use was in dairy cattle). Rapisorb enables mineral uptake to be enhanced by about 50 times compared to inorganic minerals!

A useful by-product of this technology is the ability of Rapisorb to actually help the body to remove toxic heavy metals from the system. This may have some preventative value though it is certainly not adequate for treatment of acute cases.

For maximum economy we have incorporated these minerals into our Daily Essentials vitamin products and a new, highly concentrated supplement (just one level teaspoon a day for a stud of eighty Netherland Dwarf sized rabbits!) called Essentials Plus. This also latter product contains a comprehensive vitamin blend, our unique Flourish herbal extracts and our Maxima and amino acid technologies for better fur quality and faster moulting. Essentials Plus is added to fresh foods or slightly moistened pellets or hay.